The use of spatial light modulators in projection systems offers many advantages over the standard cathode ray tube projection systems. This can be seen especially clearly in the television industry.
One of the many controversies in the television industry relating to high-definition television (HDTV) is the question of a standard format. Some companies have proposed systems that are different from the current television standard (NTSC). Systems using spatial light modulators can utilize any standard, as long as the format of the incoming signal is known, and is capable of being digitized into some known digital data pattern.
Once the data is digitized, there are still many problems to be solved in order to pass the data onto a binary spatial light modulator, one that has cells that can be turned on ("1") or off ("0"). In standard video signals, the data is sent down the wire one pixel at a time. All the data for a given pixel is sent at the same time. The temporal order of the data is sent such that this temporal order corresponds to the spatial order of the pixels within the image line. The data for binary spatial light modulators is normally loaded into the modulator in a highly parallel fashion. Only a portion, usually one bit, of the data for the given pixel is sent to the modulator at a time. This is required for the technique used to generate gray-scale images with a binary device using pulse width modulation. The data loaded into the modulator may not be spatially contiguous. The temporal-to-spatial ordering relationship does not necessarily exist for a given line of the image.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide methods and apparatus to reformat the digitized video stream into a format that will optimize the use of the binary spatial light modulator in a projection system used in televisions, or computer monitors, or any other video system.